Slashdot Mirror
Lawsuit Alleges That Palms Damage Motherboards
schussat writes: "This brief AP article describes a lawsuit that alleges that syncing a Palm Pilot "damages or destroys the motherboards on certain PC brands." Does anyone know more or have experience with this? Is it even possible to cause damage? The article is not very detailed."
Amazing, the site is /.'ed and I haven't even gotten first post yet.
Try this AP link
this on on Yahoo! works.
If the Palm's case is metallic and is connected to the Palm's ground, then I think it might be possible to avoid static discharge through the motherboard if a simple ground wire is soldered to the 0V pin of the cradle. I've never seen a Palm cradle, but they surely use a simple AC-DC converter for power which hasn't any ground wire.
I can say that I personally saw this occur several times in tech support and those of us who cared to research it saw it as a problem of static electricity and the Palm V cradle through the serial port. The real problem though was ever figuring out if the Palm V's cradle (one of the ones that plugs into the wall to charge the PDA while cradled) was truly at fault or if the motherboards were not grounded properly. Either way, it's gonna be expensive for someone because one of the units isn't quite right. We always replaced the motherboard once but warned that if the cradle was bad, it'd likely zap the replacement motherboard and we wouldn't be keen on constatly replacing a $100+ motherboard because of a $15 cradle. Eventually new revs came out for both units and it seemed to take care of itself like a lot of tech issues do. The proper people get notified and replacements are issued. I don't see why lawsuits need be filed. There are plenty of worse things happening out there to people's systems.
-A Quiet Reader
"No matter where you go... There you are..." --Buckaroo Bonzai
A static discharge could fry a sensitive control chip, which might fail short, and cause another chip, "downstream" of it, to overheat and bubble its plastic casing. I have seem similar problems on the old Epson dot-matrix printers, where a $45 control chip would periodically fail, causing the printhead to fail, and usually taking some of the power transistors which drove it along. Fortunately, the $60 (?it's been a long time) printhead and the $3 transistors would fail so quickly that they would save the $0.25 fuses.
The point? Yes, static could have caused the failure. How to prevent that? Ground things properly. Make sure that the case of each machine is grounded ("earthed" if you are in Britain), but that the cables connecting peripherals to computer have the ground wire connected at one end only (that's case ground, not signal ground). This prevents ground loops, which can also melt chips in houses with wiring problems.
Reading further down that page, we can see how Palm turned an upset customer into an extremely upset customer. He tells us that he got the run-around, that the story kept changing, and that Palm made it quite clear that they didn't care about keeping a customer happy; it wasn't their fault, and he couldn't prove it. On this page, he concludes his story. He's bitter but resigned. I have to wonder, now, whether I want to spend hundreds of dollars to buy something from a company whose service and products leave one bitter and resigned, and hundreds of dollars poorer. HP, on the other hand, has promised him a check for $100, to help defray the cost of a new motherboard. I wonder which company will get better word-of-mouth out of this epsiode?
See what I've been reading.
The problem is very common and is due to a grounding problem. The PSU of the PC uses a net filter which has two Capacitors connected from the live wire and the zero wire to the metal shield of the PSU. This is a high impedance voltage divider. This means that when the PC is not grounded it has a voltage of approximately half the net voltage which is in the states 55 volt and in europa 115 volts. The problem is that when a RS232 or PARALLEL device which uses a power supply is connected to the computer this voltage will be on the connections for a short while. Normally the earth connection should be the first one to make. This is the reason why in a USB connector the earth shield is connected before anything else it is mechanically longer !. However the RS232 connector is a bad design and when not carefully connected the signal pins will make contact before the shielding. This means that when there is a 110 volt on the case that the input will have a 110 + 5 or more volt logic level. The RS232 port does not like this and dies. When using any external device which is not designed to be hot plugable switch of everything. Or connect all the equipment on the same power outlet. Keep in mind that many modern PC do not really switch of ATX only go into some kind of standby mode in case of doubt remove the power cord from the outlet.
The USB spec explicitly says that the data lines must be able to withstand this sort of thing. In practice, they have bloody great clamp diodes (you've seen them on circuit diagrams, they're the ones connected "backwards", cathode to signal, anode to ground), which absorb the voltage spikes.
You'd have to be hot-plugging a MIG welder into your USB ports to spike them that badly.
I fried the motherboard (at least the serial port, but there seemed to be other damage as well) while synching my palm to my old PC. There's not much doubt in my mind how it happened... I picked up a static charge walking across the carpet with the palm, which then transferred said charge to the serial cable and ... well, boom. Since then, I always touch a grounded surface with the palm in my hand before setting it into its cradle. No problems since on any other machine.
P.S. I wouldn't necessarily blame Palm for this, but it seems like better design on the serial port, or on the cradle, could reduce this problem...
That's no different from hot-plugging any other devices, be it a mouse, a printer or a modem. Hot-plugging always contains the risk of damaging the chip that sits behind the port. That's nothing special to the Palm.
Hey,
The article implies that this is somehow software-based, and most people probably thought 'Bullshit', and rightly so.
A google search for Palm damage motherboard turns up some better articles: This one, and a follow-up here are both pretty good.
The guy making the claim has a page here. The guy (called Greg Gaub) details his story in which his Hewlett packard desktop computer's motherboard was ruined; Greg's claim is that the motherboard was damaged because of a faulty or badly designed Palm V cradle which doesn't dissapate static charges.
Quoth I: As you may be aware, The PalmV and Vx devices have an aluminum casing. They also have a cradle with, in my opinion, a design flaw that does not dissipate static electric charges that travel from a person (holding or reaching for their PalmV) into the cradle, and on into the desktop computer's motherboard via the serial connector.
It does seem a somewhat unlikely problem, but I suppose it could be possible, in theory at least.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I blew out both serial ports from my old motherboard once, so I'm tempted to believe this story is true.
When the first serial port stopped working, I thought it was coincidence, but then I switched the cradle to the other one, and it eventally went out, too.
-Karl
A friend of mine had a lightning-induced surge hit the phone line of a BBS we were running a few years back... weird effects. It pretty much torched the external modem, came up the serial cable, lightly browned the UART (yes, the chip casing turned brown!), hopped down the bus, and grounded out through the power supply (blowing the lids off a few electrolytic capacitors in it in the process)... everything else in the box was fine.
...when you're writing a game...tweak the difficulty of "Easy" to something [your mother] can cope with. -- onion2k
I had a Palm Vx, and synced it frequently on my Dell Dimension XPS-R400. Everything was fine until one day, for no apparent reason, the hotsync operation simply stopped working. Following a lot of calling back and forth between Palm and Dell, it was determined that this was a known problem. Over time, syncing had caused the serial port controller chip on the motherboard to fry. To remedy this, I had Palm send me a free USB connection kit, and Dell graciously agreed to replace the motherboard (the computer was still under warranty). It was all a bit of a hassle, but I got it taken care of eventually. I tend to be good at getting what I want from customer service reps, but I'm guessing that we all are, considering how much contact we have with them.
I saw an NT machine reboot after putting a Palm in the cradle. After seeing that, I would touch on of the screws in the back of the PC first and raise up the sliding cover on the palms connector, touching it to discharge any static build up before I put it in the cradle.
So, I wonder whether they really mean that the cradle causes the PC to be vulnerable to electrostatic discharge.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
I figure I might as well put my "me too" under someone else's post, but all these "it couldn't possibly happen!" posts are damn irritating when it happened to me. Put the Palm in its cradle, hear a tiny pop from the speakers, system freeze, no boot, mobo dead.
Uh Yes they do. I can show you the actual MODELS on the intel website. They are intel made. I had to do alot of work to get an old Dell 233 working with a celeron. Dellwouldn;t support it but the motherboard was made by intel and I was able ot get drivers from their website that would do it. Yes Intel chipsets but also YES to the boards as well.
Razzious Domini
I could be a GREAT KARMA WHORE if I could just shed the few morals I have left.
I've had my Handspring Visor suddenly up and reboot my machine the instant the metal contacts touch the hotsync cradle. I've called Handspring about it only to get a "We'll have to return your call" answer, with no return call of course.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
this only seems to happen with palm V's, it also doesn't seem to be restricted to specific motherboards. when the palm is in its craddle and you connect it to the pc, it will fry the port. in my experience its more of 'when' than 'if'. in fact, the [nameless major PC brand] that I was previously employed at has a policy of NOT REPLACING MOTHERBOARDS THAT HAVE PROBLEMS RELATED TO THE SERIAL PORT IN CASES WHERE A PALM V HAS BEEN INVOLVED.
Reading the guys homepage, it appears that the beef shouldn't be with Palm at all, but with HP (in this case) due to a design flaw in the motherboard. If he had carried his modem around with him for a couple hours (perhaps in his back-pack coming home from a lan party or whatever) and plugged it in, it would have a similar effect. Is it the fault of the peripheral? No - its the fault of the manufacturer for not installing a basic chip to guard against this type of issue.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I plugged in a speaker into the computer while it was on, and the processor blew. It was probably to do with the voltage differences, causing a spike in the PSU.
I can imagine that the Palm may do the same thing, but I'd hope that there would be warnings to tell people to ensure that if they're plugging different things in which are connected to the mains that they'd better make sure everything's off.
Of course, with connectors that earth levels properly, and with spike protection, this shouldn't be an issue.
I am not an electrican but as far as I know RS232 is a horrible standard to implement, requiring +15V and -15V signals - requiring voltage converter chips to run from a battery. In my limited experience some devices get away with using +/-10V, 0 and 10V and other levels. The problems here may be due to both the Palm and the motherboard using half-baked RS232 implementations - if the motherboard was expecting 0-10V and actually got +/-15V.
I'm sure someone more versed in electronic engineering could correct or confirm this. Then again, it may be a USB problem anyway.
That said, there is a lot of poorly-designed crap out there, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to meet a motherboard that blows itself up under perfectly acceptable conditions.
For consumer equipment, all externally-accessible connectors should be able to take some vicious ESD zaps on every single pin. In fact, the 'CE' requirements in Europe make this a legal requirement. As an example of how much ESD protection is in engineer's minds, take a look at this datasheet for the Maxim MAX3232E RS-232 transciever chip, which has built in +/-15kV ESD protection. (Again, there's a lot of crap being manufactured that can't take ESD like it should.) If the Palm cradle connects to a 'wall wart' transformer to recharge the battery, there is another failure mode: the output of many wall warts is capacitively coupled to the AC power line. The ones I've seen make an approx. 60 VAC sine wave on the output, as measured relative to earth ground. There isn't much current available, and a proper RS-232 design should be able to take it all day long, but I *have* seen equipment that is damaged by it. (At work we're very paranoid about explicitly grounding laptop computers in the electronic labs to keep from frying our prototypes.) Oh, bullshit. It's the engineer's responsibility to design things that will actually work in the real world. Walking up to a piece of office equipment and touching it should *never* cause smoke and/or explosions. It's almost impossible to accidentally blow up a properly designed serial port. Either Palm deliberately and maliciously designed in a destruction circuit, or your motherboard was badly designed. Knowing how crappy commodity motherboards are, I'd bet on the latter. Given that RS-232 is intended to hook up randomly-grounded pieces of equipment with 50meter cables -- and is required by law to include ESD protection in Europe -- there's no point in handling it with kid gloves. Adding optocouplers would cost about US $1.50 per unit. Adding them would mean that the tens of millions of Palm owners with correctly designed computers would be paying a $25,000,000 tax to protect the few people with defective computers. You're forgetting the fourth choice: buy a computer that actually complies with the RS-232 standards, and actually has the run-of-the-mill standard level of ESD protection. Serial ports should be able to take almost anything short of being directly connected to the AC power line. It costs only pennies more to manufacture, and it provides a much better customer experience. (The only catch is that the computer manufacturers have to actually care about doing a good job, as opposed to cranking out an extra few hundred thousand motherboards per month.) I think you under-appreciate how hard it is to design good ESD protection. It's not enough to zap your circuit, and say it has good protection if it keeps working, because ESD damage often just weakens the transistors. Doing it right takes a good theoretical understanding of the circuit, great technician-type skill at performing the tests, and a well-developed sense of paranoia. Designing good ESD protection is a lot like designing cryptographic systems: it's easy to make something that *seems* to work, but very difficult to design something that will be rock solid under years of hard use.All motherboard manufacturers are under *tremendous* schedule pressures. The engineers are being pushed and pushed and pushed to get the design shipping as fast as possible. A two week delay (an ESD fix would probably take 3-4 weeks) costs the company more than a senior engineer's yearly salary, so the tendency is to say 'We zapped it, it works, what the hell let's ship it!' Keerist, with the Rambus and MTH fiascos earlier this year, Intel was shipping motherboards where *the engineers knew the digital functions didn't work*. Their priority for ESD protection was probably two notches higher than picking lint out of their belly buttons.
Hint: the trolls want attention, and you're giving it to them. Act as if a forum is good, and it becomes better. Act as if it sucks, and it will suck worse.-- ;-)
Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end.
It's surely possible, although unlikely.
The problem occurs if there's any static charge on you. You pick up the serial cable and touch one of the pins, the cable may also end up with a charge on it. Plug it into the PC, and the serial port gets a static shock. This could (although you'd need quite some charge!) damage the serial port. Or you could do a similar thing by touching the serial port pins during the process of plugging the cable in. A really severe static charge could break through the serial port chip to the power supply and cause a spike on that which would damage other devices, although that's highly unlikely - you'd really have to be trying to build up that kind of a charge on yourself.
Of course, if the serial port connector is mounted on the mobo, then the force of plugging and unplugging it could bend the mobo slightly, which in the case of a badly-made and badly-mounted board could be enough to break a track. Or the connector could simply have failed through overuse.
More details on this are required. To win this, the plaintiffs are going to have to prove (a) that their mobos are damaged, (b) that the damage could have been caused by the Hotsync, and (c) that it was Palm's fault rather than the mobo manufacturers releasing a dodgy product. Frankly, (c) sounds a much more logical option.
Grab.
Class action does not depend on how many people have filed the lawsuit. To have class action status, all you need to show is that their claim can be found in anyone with the same product (e.g. firestone tires, all you need to show is that it has a faulty design, which means all who have the tire will have similar problems). Anyone with similar claim can choose to join them, or opt out of it.